Hamburg, Gary M. Russia's Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500–1801 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 362 during Stalin’s time, thereby hinting at the author’s more ambitious goal of offering a way out of ‘the impasse’ of defining Socialist Realist music (p. 6 and final chapter)? How the body of Soviet mainstream music might lead us towards a practical definition of Socialist Realism in music is the main topic of the concluding chapter. Frolova-Walker asserts that her overview of the Stalin Prizes reinforces the sense of music being the least oppressed art-form under the Stalinist dispensation (p. 279). Changing the perspective from the decisionmaking process to the published results, she goes on to conclude that, ‘the core of musical Socialist Realism was largely formed by pieces realizing Stalin’s slogan of “national in form, socialist in content”: those were works in a national style, often based on folk themes’, maintaining the predominance of genres such as monumental cantatas, ‘middlebrow’ concert works and concertos, as well as mass and popular songs (p. 290). Arguing against the view of Socialist Realism as ‘an arbitrary power game’, Frolova-Walker asserts that ‘the practice of the Stalin Prizes awards allows us to see Socialist Realism within a coherent narrative framework, evolving slowly, never changing beyond recognition, with demarcations between core works, acceptable but marginal works and the unacceptable’ (p. 292). Resonating with Katerina Clark’s scholarship, in particularTheSovietNovel:HistoryasRitual(Chicago,IL,1981),thisconclusion is not a full stop, but rather an invitation to an ongoing re-evaluation of musical Socialist Realism. University of Sheffield & Université Paris Sorbonne Michelle Assay Hamburg, Gary M. Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500–1801. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2016. xi + 900 pp. Notes. Index. £80.00: $125.00. Although it has not been entirely ignored, Russia’s Enlightenment is generally of marginal concern to the otherwise vibrant and diverse field of Enlightenment scholarship. Yet specialists on Russian history and literature have long offered exciting and nuanced studies applying the insights of Enlightenment research to the distinctive national political, social and cultural environment of tsarist Russia. Scholarship by distinguished historians Marc Raeff and Isabel de Madariaga on the reception, adaptation and influence of Enlightenment thought in Russia was, in fact, among the earliest and most sophisticated research in the field. Building on their work, a younger generation of historians (including Gary Marker, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, Alexander Martin and others) has widened the scope of enquiry and offered pioneering REVIEWS 363 works on the social history of Enlightenment culture in Russia. Yet for all its different questions and concerns, existing scholarship accepts that the story of Russia’s Enlightenment began with the country’s need to radically adjust its positioning towards Europe initiated by the tumultuous process of cultural modernization unleashed by Peter I. Gary M. Hamburg’s book, impressive in its sheer size, scope and ambition, calls for a new account of Russia’s relationship with the Enlightenment. Seeking to situate the influence of Western European thought within the intellectual tradition of Muscovy, Hamburg questions the classic divide between Peter and the pre-Petrine era, arguing instead for the development over three centuries of a distinctive Russian Enlightenment. Its characteristic dynamic, Hamburg claims, resulted from the elites’ openness to external influences on the one hand, and their simultaneous commitment to tradition, i.e. the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church, on the other (an understanding also persuasively explored by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter in her fine study on Metropolitan Platon). Hamburgorganizeshisbookchronologicallyinthreeparts.Thefirstexplores how early religious conceptions of righteous rulership and princely authority, originally developing out of Byzantine Christianity (Agapetos’s Advice to the Emperor was particularly influential), established a strong link between Orthodoxy and Russian politics which was challenged by the crisis of dynastic succession and political legitimacy during the Time of Troubles. Polemics concerning the harmonious relations between church and state culminated in Patriarch Nikon’s Church reforms and their repudiation by Avvakum and the Old Believers, before Peter I ascended the throne as a divinely crowned tsar. In the second part of the book Hamburg discusses the works of key intellectual figures of the first half of the eighteenth century (Iavor´skyi, Prokopovich, Pososhkov, Shavirov, Golitsyn, Tatishchev), and...